Behind the Lens with Bertie Gregory | Secrets of the Penguins | National Geographic

There we go! It's just three of us filming emperor penguins in Antarctica and the team makeup was me filming the wildlife, then there was someone filming me, and then we also had a polar safety specialist with us. In my new series, Secrets of the Penguins, we take you around the world across the range of penguins to reveal their secrets. I think what is a surprise for many people is that penguins don't just live in Antarctica. They actually have a very big range and there's lots of different species. We filmed them in South Africa, we filmed them in Argentina. One of the most surprising locations we filmed penguins was in the Galapagos Islands. They live on the equator and it was really bizarre to see bright red crabs and marine iguanas and cactuses and volcanoes alongside penguins. Their ancestors got very lost and washed up on the Galapagos Islands and incredibly managed to evolve a way to survive in what is definitely not a traditional place for a penguin to live in Antarctica. These emperor penguins often were moving over very dangerous crevasse fields. When you look out the ice, it looks like it's totally flat and solid and safe, but actually hidden under the snow are these huge ravines in the ice, these big cracks, these big crevasses, and they would go down hundreds of feet. And if you fall in one, you're toast. It is getting really cold. The biggest tech challenge in Antarctica is the wind combined with the temperature. You lose feeling in your fingers very quickly. This is getting dangerous for us now. Good luck little penguins. We were camping next to a emperor penguin colony and our goal really was to spend two months with the birds, watch the chicks grow up, and then kind of the climax to the shoot was going to be to follow them as the chicks jump in the ocean to take their very first swim. That was the plan. Now, emperor penguin chicks normally will make their way to the edge of the sea ice, usually jump one or two feet into the water. But the ice, the sea ice, started to break up and it meant we couldn't actually get to the place that the chicks were getting into the water. So I was like, oh, I'm just gonna fly the drone around because we'd seen some emperor penguin chicks disappearing over the horizon. What on earth is going on here? As I came up over this rise, I found this huge group of hundreds of chicks. And instead of being at the sea ice edge, which is just a drop of one or two feet, this group of chicks had found themselves at the edge of the shelf. That cliff has got to be 40, 50 feet high. I couldn't believe it. And I thought, okay, well, these chicks, they're going to turn around and find another way. But they all just stayed there. And then I just so vividly remember one of the chicks just taking a step forward out of the group and just sending it off the cliff. And I just remember watching it go. I had no idea if a penguin chick could survive a fall from such a height, but to my amazement, it popped up to the surface and then it just swam out to the horizon. We've seen that these chicks stick together. So I think a lot are going to start to jump. They just started to jump. And initially it was just kind of one and then they'd wait a bit and then another one. And then there was a period of about 10 minutes where they were all just pouring off the cliff. What was most interesting was that when the chicks hit the water, they had this initial moment of panic where they were kind of flapping around. I mean, this is the first time they've ever been in the ocean. They had suddenly this very quick realisation that actually I'm meant to be here and I'm this world champion freediver. It was one of the most extraordinary, if not the most extraordinary pieces of animal behaviour I've ever seen. And to capture it for television for the very first time was a real spine-tingling moment. Just when I think these penguins have hit their limit, they do something extraordinary. I hope that when you watch Secrets of the Penguins, you come away just being completely mind-blown by how extraordinary these animals are, but also how fragile they are. These penguins are incredibly adaptable, but their future lies entirely in our hands. We need to really change the way we interact with the natural world if we want to live in a world that has penguins in the future.